An IIT-Bombay team beat a Japanese institution to win the 25th Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition held this week in the US, an official said here on Wednesday.

The biggest unmanned ground vehicle competition in the world for university students, it was held at Oakland University in Michigan.

IIT-B’s unmanned ground vehicle ‘SeDriCa’ took part in all the three events and topped the Autonomous Navigation Challenge, while standing second in the Design Challenge and Interoperability Profiles Challege.

It was placed overall top among 29 competing teams from five countries around the world.

Qualifying on the opening day of the competition, the IIT-B team performed exceptionally in all the three challenges with a near-flawless run in the prestigious event this time.

Scoring 88 points out of the total 96, it beat the first runner-up, a Japanese team by 32 points.

The IIT-B team was mentored by academicians S. N. Merchant from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Ramesh Singh from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at its Powai Campus.

The competing team was led by Ankit Sharma and Rishabh Choudhary with participating members Anjan Kumar Patel, Ravi Jain, Vatsal Kansara, Surya Teja, Krishna Sandeep and Rohit Bhor.

This has been billed as “the best performance till date” by any Indian team and also raises the bar for IIT-B across all similar competitions.